I have seen ads for mouse gadgets with lots of buttons for gamers and pedals for transcriptionists (pedal is not a hand device though).
Are there other categories of people out there who use unusual variants of mouse or keyboard? For instance, would special purpose mouse, keyboard or other input devices be useful for financial traders?
Bar code scanners and special keyboards are common in retail.
There are specialized input devices for people who do 3D CAD work, like these.
interesting, thanks. Associated wikipedia article is here 3Dconnexion - Wikipedia
How advanced would you like?
Control surfaces for audio mixing like one of these?
Motion capture for animation planning? PDF
not sure if it’s a hand input device, but it’s interesting to know that “the most cost-effective means of tracking full-body motions in the world today” costs a minimum of $18K. http://www.vrealities.com/motionstar.html . Is it supposed to be vastly more accurate than Kinect or are they engaging in excessive puffery?
Funny thing, I used to work in the financial industry, and have spent several years selling stuff to the financial industry. Almost all traders, sales and others in the finance industry use the basic “free” keyboards and mice that come with a PC. At one point, I did some pilots with some big investment banks to prove that ergonomic keyboards and mice were a worthy investment for traders that personally make millions per year and make the banks tens if not hundreds of millions per year. Banks were too cheap to bite. Seriously, to be more accurate, they had trouble finding the budget bucket that would let them buy extra peripherals. Just goes to show that banks can be penny wise and pound foolish as the best of them.
perhaps the traders themselves should have a strong incentive to obtain optimal gadgets that would help them do a better job and get bigger bonus? Is anything stopping them from bringing in their own gadgets and plugging them into usb port?
What user actions are involved in typical trader workflow? Is fast and accurate keyboard input relevant in the first place or do they mostly work with the mouse?
Court reporters have special chording keyboards to speed up transcription (it’s a lot more than just a pedal).
This sounds strange to me since Financial traders make extensive use of multiple displays to let them see many many graphs and spreadsheets in realtime. Some as many as 8 diaplays on one PC. Surely peripherals would come under the same budget as displays.
In my industry (VFX) the Wacom tablet is a standard, it’s more ergonomic and it speeds up input over mouse for a skilled user for 3 or 4 times for editing and graphic design work.
There is also more specialised controllers such as the Avid Artist Color:
http://www.avid.com/US/products/Artist-Color
Its a control surface designed for color correction. I have one of these (as well as a a Wacom tablet) and it’s great.
A bit of an aside, but floor traders (at least at the Chicago Stock Exchange) traditionally used HP PDAs with a custom wireless adapter and a specific OS overlay (not just a WinMo app, it looked like an OS replacement) letting them make transactions realtime. It’s more of a custom computer than a custom peripheral, but certainly trade-specific gadgetry.
The Motionstar is based on the same technology as the Flock of Birds motion sensors. These are good to about 1mm in each dimension in a ten foot cube, and good for about one degree of rotation in each axis. I used one of these in an immersive virtual reality system. They really do work that well. And $18k is cheaper than I remember them being - especially the wireless version.
In terms of handheld input devices, the standard device in a Cave (a ten foot cube VR system) was a wand, that used a single sensor to determine its position, and had a set of buttons plus a joystick. Here. This page reminds me of a couple of other input devices. The pinch glove, also featured on this page. However the ultra cool device is a force feedback robot. Like these. They can produce such minute nuances in feel that they can model the feel of different materials and textures with uncanny fidelity.
Or for simply cool interaction, a Reactable
I’m an accountant and definitely use custom devices - ergonomic keyboard with a standalone numeric pad that has a few extra buttons (like tab and delete). I use gaming mice for the extra precision and extra buttons. All of these help me to get more done without having to move my hands.
However, I’m pretty much alone in that; most of my peers use standard input devices.
Likewise, I’m a programmer and use one of these. Worth the money IMHO, if only because they last and don’t wear out my fingers.
That too.
I didn’t say it made sense. It’s probably because the traders didn’t understand what they were missing, and the IT department are shit scared of traders. It is true though that investment bank budgets can be pretty screwed up. Especially after the Big Reset.
Mainly it’s keyboard input across multiple displays. Back when I was in the biz, you would have several different computers/terminals, with one for each app. For example, Bloomberg would be 2 screens with a seperate keyboard, Reuters would be a seperate machine and/or pc, the old Quotron was seperate, trading systems might be PC or proprietary (Swiss Bank Corp ran the biggest NeXT network for example), maybe you’d be running a Sun Spark machine as well. There were order execution/back office settlement systems as well as the stock exchange interface. It was an unholy mess.
Most traders don’t think about optimizing their keyboards or mice. I was involved in much more than tryiing to sell comfortable keyboards - that was just a tiny piece.